Conventionally arrangement or arrangement of frequency for a new service or allocation or arrangement of frequency to new service providers was led by the government.
In particular, when new corners have entered, the government allocated a new frequency to them through an auction, or the like, or collects an existing frequency from an existing service provider and re-deploy it for a different service provide, thereby allotting frequency as limited resource.
However, recently, as demand for wireless data traffic is explosively increased in the wake of the spreading of various wireless Internet-based applications such as open terminal platform, App store, mobile VoIP, and the like, the government-driven frequency allocation or arrangement is considered very ineffective and it is increasingly difficult to secure a new frequency on a table of frequency allocation fundamentally.
In particular, in line with the rapid growth of broadcast and communication systems, next-generation communication systems have been designed in a converged form of several networks and increasingly complicated, and the necessity of interaction or interworking is extending. Also, development of communication technologies and services has increased the frequency of use in frequency resources and the occupancy of a particular frequency band in a fixed manner to provide excellent communication techniques and services has caused severe depletion of frequency
Recently, a frequency sharing scheme has come to prominence as a solution to the problems. This starts from a point of view that the current frequency shortage phenomenon is resulted from an existing partition type frequency management scheme and, although frequency appears to be insufficient on the table of frequency allocation but such frequency shortage can be solved through a sharing scheme.
As the depletion of frequency resources has been admitted to be significant worldwide, FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to the US decided to apply a cognitive radio technology, a frequency sharing technology, to a TV white space and revised a relevant regulation.
Such a movement is gradually extending, and in 2009, England has permitted the use of a CR (Cognitive Radio)-based frequency sharing technology in a band, included in a TV broadcast band, which is not spatially used, namely, a white space band. EU is discussing the introduction of the CR-based frequency sharing technology, and, also domestically, preparations for a frequency sharing policy using the white space band are being made.
The CR technology refers to a system in which a communication device observes a communication environment by itself, determines and selects an operation scheme for optimum communication, and makes a plan for a future determination process from a previous communication experience. Namely, the CR technology locates idle resource (spectrum hole, white space) which has low utilization or is temporally/spatially not used among frequency bands allocated to unlicensed band, and adaptively and opportunistically uses it. In this case, when a primary user having a license for a corresponding band is discovered, the use of the corresponding band should be stopped or transmit power is adjusted not to cause damage to the primary user.
Meanwhile, locating such an idle frequency band can be more conveniently implemented in a homogeneous communication system. However, heterogeneous communication systems, e.g., IEEE 802.16, WCDMA, or LTE, use different frequency bands, so it is very difficult to find an idle frequency band.